In 1999, I happened to share a dinner table with the recently disgraced Tory director of communications Andy Coulson.
Coulson was then editor of the Sun‘s Bizarre column and he spent a large part of the evening holding court and talking loudly about those celebrities who ‘got it’ and those that didn’t ‘get it’. Chris Evans ‘got it’ he said, but Hugh Grant didn’t ‘get it’.
‘It’ was that the celeb in question understood and accepted that having their names, families, relationships and reputations trashed each day in the tabloids was all just a bit of fun, fair game, cheeky banter, part and parcel of what comes with being famous. Evans went along with it and didn’t complain; Grant, on the other hand, was less compliant.
After what’s happened in recent weeks, I can’t help but wonder whether Andy Coulson ‘gets it’.
The Great Wen 
Morning Pete,
An interesting post given your well-tested theory about hacks and the hive mind. Went to a Q&A session as part of some music industry event many years back – the main event was Piers Morgan (still editor of the Mirror, I think) giving a talk on how the industry didn’t use the press effectively enough followed by him interviewing Simon Cowell.
Premise was if you’ve used the media on the road to stardom (whatever that might be) then you’re fair game and the wording was almost exactly what you’ve described re Coulson; Kylie was alright because she ‘got it’, but so-and-so (can’t actually remember who – probably someone who’d sued the Mirror) wouldn’t play the game and thus wasn’t. Cowell (just pre huge fame and wealth) said that most artists generally weren’t keen to engage with the press on anything other than a carefully managed level for the reasons stated – i.e. hurtful, spiteful and invasive tabloid attention into their private lives under the guise of tabloid banter actually wasn’t that nice at all.
How long before Coulson returns to the NI fold, then?